170 MIDLAND UNION PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



designated. The Annual Meetings have caused many acquaintances to 

 be formed among scientific workers in the Midlands. Five vols, of 

 The Midhind NnturaUst have been issued, which will form a permanent 

 record of the work done by the various Societies. 



The Darwin Prize was founded 1881 ; and the first award was 

 to a Nottingham geologist — E. Wilson, Esq., F.G.S. Mr. Darwin 

 has always taken an interest in the Union, and was a subscriber 

 from the first to its organ, 'The Midland Naturalixt. 



I shall now offer a few remarks, first on " General Geology " and 

 the "Glacial Drift Deposits," for the sake of referring to the work 

 which has been done by some of our members, and shall follow these 

 by more extended notices of " The Geology of the Nottingham District," 

 the " Mollusca " of the county, its " Ornithology '" and " Botany." 



GENERAL GEOLOGY. 



The work of the Geological Survey must not be considered as final, 

 but only as indicating the lines for local research. Mr. Shipman has 

 made important corrections and additions in the Nottingham district. 

 Professor Lapworth and Mr. F. T. S. Houghton have shown that 

 the quartzite of the Lower Lickey Hills, near Bromsgrove, is not 

 of Llandovery age, for which it was mapped by the Government 

 Survey, bxit that it is immensely older, belonging to the Lower 

 Cambrian formation. A patch of Llandovery sandstone rests, at 

 one point, against the quartzite. Mr. W. J. Harrison has foiind that 

 the rocks of Dosthill, in the North of Warwickshire, mapped as 

 " Greenstone" by the Survey, are really fossiliferous Cambrian shales, 

 traversed by dykes of diorite ; the same geologist has shown, in con- 

 junction with Prof. Lapworth, that the Hartshill quartzite, which 

 forms a ridge bet%veen Nuneaton and Atherstone, is, together with a 

 mass of overlying shaly beds, also of Cambrian age, being the 

 equivalent of the Lickey rock. 



GLACIAL DRIFT DEPOSITS. 



Little progress has been made with this subject, the complexity 

 and difficulty of which becomes yearly more apparent. Mr. Harrison 

 has furnished Mr. Searles V. Wood with a number of observations 

 made by himself on the drift of Leicestershire, and he has used 

 these in his paper on the " Newer Pliocene Period in England," 

 read before the Geological Society of London, and published in 

 their journal (vol. 36, p. 457). In a paper Mr. Harrison lately read 

 before the Philosophical Society of Birmingham, on the " Quartzite 

 Pebbles in the Drift," he endeavours to show that these are derived 

 firstly from the Bunter Conglomerate of the Trias. The latter bed is 

 itself derived from an old Palfeozoic ridge which stretched across 

 Central England ; and not from the Old Red Conglomerate of Scotland, 

 as the usually accepted theory put forth originally by Prof. E. Hull 

 would have us believe. 



